Capacity building through eLearning is a strong pillar in the national strategies and work plans of some GBIF nodes, such as South Africa (SANBI-GBIF) and Spain. With this project, the partners aim to optimize efforts and grow national capacity in the use of the eLearning platform and functionality, to support its training events and production of curriculum content.
Specifically, SANBI-GBIF will explore with GBIF Spain ways of enabling mining of data and identification of key tools, techniques and approaches that can be used to ask some pertinent research questions related to time, space and taxonomy—as exemplified by a study published by GBIF Spain in 2013 (Otegui et al., 2013).
The expected impact of this project includes a findings report on the potentials—and shortcomings—of GBIF data in responding to societal challenges in the national context, and a eLearning training course on data mining techniques.
Project progress
The project began with an institutional visit of SANBI-GBIF to GBIF-Spain in December 2022, focusing on the training related to the eLearning Platform, as well as discussions with regards to data use and data analysis, in addition, to data science aspects such as big data and Artificial intelligence.
During this time work towards the training workshop to be held in South Africa in June 2023 started, with discussions and engagements being conducted on the identification of data techniques and analyses to support impactful data use cases/stories. Lists of topics, techniques, and trainers were also established, allowing for a draft agenda to be prepared and course content being created on the eLearning platform.
The project has been promoted through both SANBI-GBIF’s and GBIF-Spain’s social media platform Twitter during the one-week training in Spain, as well as via an article on SANBI-GBIF hosted portal website. During the first half the project visibility of the project was also raised at a Biodiversity Informatics conference, November 2022 at a national event, hosted by the University of Stellenbosch.
While there was a delayed start to the project due to COVID regulations, implementation of the project has progressed and the project team monitors it’s progress through regular contact and meetings.
